I really wish I had the brains to do math to figure out things like the Rubik's cube. I find it fascinating how you can model something like this and express it with math.
https://www.ryanheise.com/cube/theory.html https://www.ryanheise.com/cube/fundamental_techniques.html
From there you should have enough of an understanding to start Googling things, playing with a cube, and Learning the Heise method: https://www.ryanheise.com/cube/heise_method.html
You may have some more success in other areas of advanced math, particularly abstract algebra, graph theory, and related fields. You'll find more connections between that and what we do as developers than between programming and differential equations. And not just in the sorts of problems we solve (routing, etc.), but also in mapping between the structure of programs/architectures and concepts in algebra and graph theory.
Another crucial thing for me (post-college) is the absence of grading or immediate external or internal pressure. If I have trouble with a math or CS concept, I just set it down. It has no impact on remaining employed or future job prospects (well, mostly, some geometry and trig refreshers were good when doing some geographic stuffs; learning some languages were critical to a job, but that's not theory). Additionally, I removed the pressure from myself. If I don't get something, I don't (as I did in college, which led to other problems) see it as a personal defect or deficiency. It's just a fact, I simply don't understand it. I re-read the same material over and over across a several year period (Knuth's Concrete Mathematics) before certain sections of it became accessible to me. I desired to understand it, so I returned to it. But despite the desire, I didn't feel any external or internal pressure to understand it at that precise moment. When understanding came, it was a good feeling. But when it didn't, it was just a thing.
same with history. In school it was boring but now I listen to historical audiobooks all the time and love it.
Well, they are indeed difficult if you want to develop a new method of solving an equation or if you have discovered a new type of equation (which does not happen a lot these days). Otherwise, solving a differential equation seems to be not much more than simply a matter of recognizing a pattern and choosing the corresponding method.
> It is a BS opinion that one which says that maths is something got by putting bricks over bricks. By the contrary, it consists of an eternal returning to the same points, ever seeing them from a different perspective, with deeper understanding.
But want to point out the same concept within programming. As a programmer most of us learned to get things done, but often poorly, when we started. Instead of an array, your early programs likely used A1, A2, A3, etc. Then you learn arrays and suddenly what seemed like a bear to maintain was made trivial, and the utility of for loops was made obvious. Dozens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of lines of code could be eliminated with simple patterns from these early programs.
See things like The Evolution of a Haskell Programmer [0] for an entertaining take on this idea. When you start viewing mathematics in a similar light it can really help improve your level of math comprehension rapidly.
Sure, you could do sums before you learned calculus. But it was tedious to sum up N values of a discrete function (without a computer, of course). Then you learn calculus and find out how to integrate that function and then the summation becomes as trivial as the integration (easy in some cases, hard in others). Instead of treating each new math concept as totally new or a level above the thing before, examine how prior problems can be solved in light of this new concept. And, like programming, there will be a hundred ways to solve a particular problem (different data representations, different techniques). Learn to see the same problem from multiple perspectives and see how that shifts the difficulty of solving it.
[0] https://www.willamette.edu/~fruehr/haskell/evolution.html